6 ms·

I'm skeptical of such articles, but this one had a lot of good advice. I so hate country selection popups that have 200 countries in them, and United States is

by bugsy 15y ago

I'm skeptical of such articles, but this one had a lot of good advice. I so hate country selection popups that have 200 countries in them, and United States is near the bottom even though 95% of their customers are in the US, or perhaps they don't even ship outside the US. So many sites do that and it is infuriating.

hellweaver666 15y ago
This kind of thing is the curse of using off the shelf e-commerce packages. You can easily avoid these kind of mistakes if you roll your own.
- reedlaw 15y ago
  Then why does Skype do it for every out-going phone call? I have to select US from the drop down list every time I make a call even though my Skype number is US based.
  - beagle3 15y ago
    My skype defaults to the country listed in my profile. Maybe yours does too?
  - personalcompute 15y ago
    I remember reading in the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines (a document that defines consistency standards for gnome (linux gui) applications) that countries should always be alphabetically ordered as to not appear to favor any of them. Interestingly, it doesn't appear to be in the guidelines anymore though.
    - BrandonM 15y ago
      That makes a lot more sense in Gnome, a world-distributed open source project, than it does on many websites, where it's quite easy to figure out the source of the majority of your traffic.
  - MichaelGG 15y ago
    Or just dial the full number, starting with a plus. For a Colorado number, for example, +1303..... and it'll correctly select the country and just work. (It'll detect the country as soon as it can. For country code 1, that means 4 digits, to see if it's US, Canada, or one of the many islands using the same area code (NANP).)
armandososa 15y ago
Even that is unnecesary. Every shady "live chat with girls on Guadalajara" ad knows where I am located. Why is that the stupid registration form can't?
lamby 15y ago
> I so hate country selection popups that have 200 countries in them, and United States is near the bottom Another related problem for us Brits is that you sometimes end up doing a hunt up and down the list for one of "United Kingdom" -> "England" -> "Great Britain" -> "Britain" -> "British Isles" -> "The United Kingdom" etc. etc, whilst trying to remember all the different "synonyms".

by bugsy 15y ago

hellweaver666 15y ago

This kind of thing is the curse of using off the shelf e-commerce packages. You can easily avoid these kind of mistakes if you roll your own.

reedlaw 15y ago
Then why does Skype do it for every out-going phone call? I have to select US from the drop down list every time I make a call even though my Skype number is US based.
- beagle3 15y ago
  My skype defaults to the country listed in my profile. Maybe yours does too?
- personalcompute 15y ago
  I remember reading in the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines (a document that defines consistency standards for gnome (linux gui) applications) that countries should always be alphabetically ordered as to not appear to favor any of them. Interestingly, it doesn't appear to be in the guidelines anymore though.
  - BrandonM 15y ago
    That makes a lot more sense in Gnome, a world-distributed open source project, than it does on many websites, where it's quite easy to figure out the source of the majority of your traffic.
- MichaelGG 15y ago
  Or just dial the full number, starting with a plus. For a Colorado number, for example, +1303..... and it'll correctly select the country and just work. (It'll detect the country as soon as it can. For country code 1, that means 4 digits, to see if it's US, Canada, or one of the many islands using the same area code (NANP).)

armandososa 15y ago

Even that is unnecesary. Every shady "live chat with girls on Guadalajara" ad knows where I am located. Why is that the stupid registration form can't?

lamby 15y ago

> I so hate country selection popups that have 200 countries in them, and United States is near the bottom Another related problem for us Brits is that you sometimes end up doing a hunt up and down the list for one of "United Kingdom" -> "England" -> "Great Britain" -> "Britain" -> "British Isles" -> "The United Kingdom" etc. etc, whilst trying to remember all the different "synonyms".